Re-splitting, De-synchronizing, Re-animating: (E)motion, Neo-spectacle and Innocence in the Film Works of John Stezaker

Abstract

This discussion seeks to position the film loops, and film-related iconography, by John Stezaker within the discourses of ‘animation’. The analysis re-positions ‘animation’ both as an extension of its own anticipated limits, and within a broader spectrum of moving-image practices, ultimately using Stezaker’s work as an exemplar of both a resistance to the way film is used in dominant experimental arts practice, and the way in which ‘animation’ has been understood within these parameters. His rhetorical and enunciative re-splitting of the image, linearly, laterally, contextually and temporally, de-synchronizes orthodoxies in experimental film, animation and experimental animation, pointing up ‘the gesture’ and the ‘micro-narrative’ as the fundamentals of neo-spectacle.